an exponent of the Native mind and feeling. It is in connection with the latter branch of my labors that I appear here today as publisher of the Nil Durpan, which I edited with the view of informing Europeans of influence of its contents as giving Native popular opinion on the Indigo question. This work (the English translation), was not got up at the suggestion of Natives, or even with their knowledge, and was not circulated among them. It was commenced at the request of others. Many of the remarks of Mr. Peterson, the Counsel for the prosecution, are strongly in my favour because if, as he stated, the work was so injurious in its Vernacular dress, was I not doing a public service by making such a work known in English? Not in Calcutta, where it might only lead to more bitter controversy, and where men's interests are so concerned that all representations would have been useless, producing irritation, not conviction: I circulated it chiefly among men of influence and those connected with the British legislature which, to the oppressed of whatever color or country, has always afforded sympathy and redress. I have aimed for the last ten years in my leisure hours to be an exponent of Native opinion in its bearing on the spiritual, social, and intellectual welfare of Natives of this land; as for instance, when applied to, on the part of the Court of Directors, seven years ago, to procure for their Library copies of all original works in Bengali, or as when, lately, I sent to Oxford by request copies of all Bengali translation from Sanskrit; or when I have procured for missionaries, Government, Rajas &c, Vernacular books of all kinds I should have been a strange person indeed, had my opinion harmonised with all the chaos of opinion in those various publications. Why! at the request of missionaries I have procured anti-Christian works for them, as they wished to know what was written against Christianity.
I am charged with slandering English women in the Nil Durpan. Now, waiving the point that it is only planters' wives the Native author refers to, I myself believe planters' wives are as chaste as any other females of English Society in India, and it was my impression that the author only referred to some exceptional cases, not giving them as specimens of a class of females. The view that I and others, who know Oriental life, have taken of this part relating to females is, it gives the Eastern
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